With Christmas coming around the corner, every workplace will start getting geared up to celebrate this fun festival! What’s more is that this is the first time after the entire spread of Covid, that the possibility of having a Christmas get-together and indulging in team building games has even become possible (with social distancing).
While this is awesome, indulging in social distancing and playing workplace team building activities may seem tough. But don’t worry, this is very possible provided you take a few steps of caution.
So, let’s dive right in to know what are the top 10 Christmas team building activities you can do this Christmas while maintaining social distancing
The Good Old Scavenger Hunt Game
This game has been around for decades and it almost seems like whoever made it knew it would always really come in handy. The beauty of a scavenger hunt is that there is more than enough distance maintained.
Everyone needs to put on their thinking cap, but teams are small, and clues are always quite far away from one another. This game will not only help you maintain social distancing but also make your team brainstorm. Working together to plan strategies, share ideas and decipher clues is perhaps one of the best and fun team building activities for a workplace.
Considering how this applies to real-time work, this activity is one of the most ideal to indulge in.
Step Up Your Fashion Sense
Fashion and critical thinking can go hand in hand. Believe it or not, creating a great outfit can take as much thinking and figuring out an entire commercial campaign. How? By asking your employees to put on their fashion caps. In this game, the instructions are simple.
Dress up as your favourite Christmas character. Big fan of Santa? The Grinch? Rudolf? The very helpful elves? Whatever they choose, the objective is to create the best costume possible that suits the character. But hold on! There is one super catch. You can’t just order a ready-made costume from Amazon.
You can only create this costume with possessions that you already own. Which is typical making the best of what you have in a situation. The beauty of this game is that your employees will be forced to think long and hard as to how to make the best of a situation. This in turn will help them learn how to indulge in creative thinking and come up with the best possible solution with already available resources.
Therefore, this activity falls under the most fun team building activities and game ideas for work.
Christmas Sweets Cannot Be Ignored
Christmas is never complete without some good old cookies and milk. So why not get everyone to share what their versions of sweets and cookies look and taste like? In this activity, you set up tables and stations where participants can work individually or with a maximum of up to one more partner.
All tables must be sufficiently apart so that social distancing is maintained at all times. Now we understand that a full-fledged baking situation can become a money-consuming activity, which is why the catch here will be that these sweets must be no-bake items. Let your employee’s minds go wild and allow them to unleash creativity and come up with quirky and maybe even new sweet ideas.
This encourages your employees to tap into the creative and impulsive side of their minds to come up with a great and tasty idea that will work. Let’s just say that this falls under a very sweet category of team building activities.
Criminal Detectives
All of us have always had a detective fantasy where we get to play the cop or an FBI agent who is quick to catch the culprit. So why not bring that to life? There can be teams of 5 wherein every member plays a role.
The cop, the criminal, the witness, the partner in crime, and the victim. Brainstorm a couple of fun themes and stories behind every death and you can get the teams to decipher clues and hints that can help them get to the bottom of the story. This activity is excellent and comes under the category of team building games.
This makes your employees learn how to be team players and how to work well with a crowd. Understanding how to solve differences and find solutions with people having different working styles is always a bonus.
Be A Quiz Master
One of the best things that happened during the pandemic and the lockdown is that people discovered a lot of new movies and shows that they became huge fans of. This in turn has given us a chance to put their minds to the test and find out who could be the king/queen of knowing all about these shows.
Pick up some popular movie franchises or sitcoms such as Harry Potter, Friends, Money Heist, How I Met Your Mother, James Bond, Brooklyn 99, and more. Then segregate teams as per their likings and become a quiz master and get teams to work in pairs.
There can be three teams, consisting of two players each who work towards winning the quiz. This game is great as part of fun team building activities for the workplace.
Stand Up Shows
There are two types of people. Those who ooze humour even if they don’t want to and those who try their level best to be humorous but just don’t hit the right mark. Why not bring out the best in both? Creating teams of two, get your employees to come up with a humorous skit or stand up to entertain the crowd.
The beauty of this is that in most cases, people will get paired up with one person who is not as funny. This creates opportunities for two people to bond and bounce ideas off each other and come halfway towards what the final product would be.
This promotes inclusiveness and understanding and can teach your employees valuable lessons on how to get along with people who are completely different from them which is why this is a great team building activity.
Dub It Out
This exercise can prove to be one hell of a funny event or you may discover some amazing talent on your team. In this game, people can either choose to pair up or do this alone. The task is simple, pick out a 5-minute scene from one of your favourite movies or shows and then go ahead and dub them.
Your employees can either make it very funny or recreate the same scene and dub the actor/actress’s voice to make it as real as possible. Finally, on the d day, all these scenes are played out to everyone and a winner gets decided.
This game is part of team building activities to bring out the talent and learn how to work together to get a project done.
Create Your Own Christmas Story
This is perhaps one of the best office group activities that are guaranteed to be highly memorable. In this game, your entire group can participate to create one big story that will always be their own to remember.
The game is simple. A theme is given to the entire team. For example, Santa’s last visit, Rudolf’s adventure, The day all the elves went missing, etc. It could be anything as long as it is Christmas-specific. Once the topic is shared with the team, all members need to write two sentences to help build a story. The boss will be the one to create the introductory two lines while the others need to continue the story.
Assign numbers to your teammates and once they are done writing both their lines, you call out these numbers and start joining all sentences. This will finally create one beautiful story that can then be printed into books and shared with all your employees. You can title it ‘Our Christmas Story 2021’.
This can become a tradition and can be done every year. This will bring about a sense of unity and bonding between all which is why this is one of the best team building games.
Create Your Own Shark Tank Show
Based on the actual Shark Tank show, get your team members to come up with ideas that can help make the workplace better. It could be buying something or incorporating something to help make work life better, but they need to sell the idea to panels or as we call it “the dragons”. A team of 5 will act as judges to help determine which of the ideas presented by the teams will finally be accepted.
However, be sure to incorporate the winning idea or else everyone will feel like it was only just a game. This activity is guaranteed to bring out the best of ideas and improve your team members’ sales skills.
Since everyone will bring to the table different selling styles, this is the perfect game to include in team building activities and game ideas for work.
A Talent Show
Simple, yet effective. As a leader, there is nothing better than this idea to help understand your teammates. Through this activity, your employees will get a chance to display their talents and a leader gets the chance to get to know how well these talents can be used to make work more fun.
Many may even realize that their teammates could work in another department if they show the talent for it. However, this is a sure-shot activity that will bring out the best in everyone. Compliments will be shared; confidence is built and happiness is sure to spread around. Be sure that the winner gets a fabulous prize.
So, get geared up to indulge in all of these activities while maintaining social distancing. The beauty about all these group activities is that all of these can be done virtually, or they can be done one-on-one too. In both cases, social distancing can be maintained, and the safety of your employees is assured!
Happy Christmas!